Technique could provide the first non-invasive, definitive diagnosis before death
A team of chemists at the Harvard Institutes of Medicine is at work on a non-invasive method to show images of plaque deposits in the brains of Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients as the disease progresses. Currently, the only way to definitively diagnose both the plaque formation and the disease is to examine the patient's brain after death.
The laboratory studies are currently underway with animals, and have been published in the July 29 issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, published by the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. (The report initially was published on the journal's Web site on July 2, 1999.)
"We envision a time when individuals who may be at risk to develop AD because of a family history, the presence of a susceptibility genetic marker, or an epidemiological risk will routinely be imaged" using the new technology, said Peter T. Lansbury, Ph.D., leader of the Harvard research team. He noted that this would allow definitive diagnosis and therapy faster than is now possible.
The Alzheimer's disease brain is characterized by abnormal amyloid plaque deposit in an amount that roughly correlates with the severity of symptoms at the time of death. While many factors strongly suggest that amyloid formation precedes neurodegeneration, a direct proof is lacking, Lansbury notes. For that reason, he says, "we sought to elucidate the relationship between amyloid formation and neurodegeneration by designing amyloid probes that could be used to measure brain amyloid noninvasively" and compare the course of amyloid deposition with symptom progression.
Lansbury's strategy involves coupling an isotope of the element technetium to
large organic molecules that are known to have an affinity for amyloid of the
type that characterize
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Contact: Mary Stanik
m_stanik@acs.org
202-872-4065
American Chemical Society
5-Aug-1999